As this is a list of fiction pet peeves, and we're approaching the top, it’s probably not necessary to start out by noting the intensity of my loathing for this habit of fictional parents, but I’m going to anyway.

Hate it.

Swinging at it with a red-hot mace hate it.

Okay, let’s get on with this.

I’m talking about those fictional parents who unilaterally and selfishly disapprove of their children growing up and pursuing happiness in any way (especially romantically), while asking us, the audience, to sympathize with their pathologically unreasonable dehumanizing of said children, who often aren’t children at all.

Pictured: A disapproving father and a goddamn assistant district attorney superhero!

Let’s just say it, one of the biggest problems with these fictional parents is that they’re almost always fathers obsessing over maintaining control over their daughters.

This assumption that girls have less of a right or desire to make their own choices and mistakes in the pursuit of adulthood (and sex) than boys do, or that it’s somehow cute and fitting for fathers to feel a sense of possession of their daughters that doesn’t apply to sons or mothers, is a massive real life issue of inequality that fiction more often than not plays for cheap laughs.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

Oh, wait, I decided I like my adopted daughter’s husband after all. Guess I better musically sign over the lease and title. Cue the awwws.

Shudder.

This kind of parental disapproval also gets used, bafflingly, in attempts to make villains sympathetic by supposedly proving that they “care” about someone other than themselves, in spite of the fact that their possessiveness usually demonstrates the exact opposite.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.

And as horrible as the gender stereotyping is in all these, that’s not to say that the mother-son, mother-daughter, and father-son versions don’t exist, or that they can’t also be hugely problematic.

Lois’s behavior toward her sons on Malcolm in the Middle, for example, is notoriously nightmarish.

She disapproves of almost everything any of them do, including most of their relationships, plans out each of their lives from beginning to end down to the smallest detail, and applies techniques banned by the Geneva conventions to make them comply with her vision. And yet, Lois as a character is not only played for laughs but played for sympathy, with her actions repeatedly excused and justified as tough love.

As with many overused and oversimplified fictional motifs, there’s of course a tiny grain of truth in here that occasionally gets explored with some actual care. It’s no secret that parents and their children fight, or that parents (ideally) want to protect their children. Sometimes parents are overcautious or slow in recognizing their children’s maturing capabilities and needs, or they project their own experiences on their children beyond the point where it’s helpful, and often parenting mistakes are made with the best intentions.

This is all real, exploration-worthy stuff.

Edna from Hairspray is a perfect positive example of a disapproving fictional parent, one who tries to veto her daughter’s ambitions in an attempt to shield her from reliving her own disappointments, but who eventually learns to trust in her daughter’s self-confidence, becomes her biggest cheerleader, and comes out of her own shell, inspired by her daughter’s example.

King Triton from The Little Mermaid follows a similar pattern.

He certainly crosses a major line when he destroys all of Ariel’s stuff, but he doesn’t do it out of a blanket disapproval of the concept of his daughter growing up and falling in love. In fact, when he first hears the rumor that Ariel’s in love, he’s thrilled for her and can’t wait to meet the object of her affections. There isn’t even a mention of any political restrictions on whom Ariel should marry, being a princess and all. He doesn’t break out a shred of disapproval until he finds out that Eric is human, at which point he flips out over that very specific prejudice, instantly feels horrible about it, and ends up growing to accept Ariel’s choice and celebrate her happiness.

Parents placing a different level of value or different expectations on boys and girls is also a very real issue that can be depicted responsibly. Park's parents in Eleanor & Park are a great example of fictional parents who do this but ultimately learn to accept and respect that their son isn't what they once assumed he should be.

Of course, not all fictional parents have to work out their issues and end up supportive allies of their children by the end. Real life sadly holds truly terrible parents as well, parents who exert control over their children for entirely selfish reasons, without wanting to see them grow into self-reliant adults with happy romantic relationships and full lives. Fiction has a place for those parents too.

Ahem.

That place is not smiling in the opening credits of a show about a heartwarming, would-be appealing family.

The Secret Life of Bees does the extreme negative of the gender issue well, because even though Lily's father is given a slight, grim sort of pity toward the end, he’s fully acknowledged as a bad father. Treating a child as a possession rather than a budding human being due to gender (or for any reason), is bad parenting, and he’s a bad parent. No arguments there.

There’s nothing wrong with unhealthy relationships in fiction, as long as the work doesn’t ask us to believe that they’re anything else.

The point where the disapproving parent triggers this peeve is where a story shrugs off this kind of bad parenting as “just the way parents are,” or, more commonly and insidiously, “just the way fathers with daughters are.”

I’m looking at you, Arrow/Flash/Legends of Tomorrow TV universe.

If you’re a dad with a daughter on these shows, you automatically hate any man she might be romantically involved with. You hate any possibility of her doing anything dangerous which, given the superhero universe, means doing anything at all. In fact, you usually hate the possibility of her ever hearing about the existence of anything dangerous or meaningful or plot-related in any way, unless, in the case of Merlyn, you need to use her for some part of your own scheme which you’ll later claim had something to do with loving her. You fully endorse the use of guns and dishonesty to keep her under control.

Oh, she might call you out on it on occasion, but don’t worry, less than an episode later, she’ll tell you how right unconditionally forgiven you are, because you were “only trying to protect her.”

Then you’ll make a condescending, off-the-shelf joke about how all fathers want to keep their daughters helpless and isolated forever and you just can’t help it and couldn't possibly be expected to.

…Bull…. Shit.

This dysfunction is not inevitable. It is not healthy, and it is not cute. Respecting your adult daughters as human beings is not too lofty an ideal to aspire to. There are plenty of wonderful, supportive parents in the real world, who want their children, daughters included, to chase their dreams and their dream partners and live real, adult lives.

This is what good parents want for their children. The same things they’d want for themselves.

There are even a few of these parents in fiction, though not nearly enough.

Know what I think, Lance, West, and Merlyn? I think if you couldn’t be motivated by disapproving of everything your daughters do for no reason, your shows wouldn’t know what to do with you.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Parent #3, #4, and #5) I've already talked about Love, Actually on my lists of favorite fictional love triangles and favorite fictional romantic gestures. It's a movie made up of loosely tied together stories about love of different kinds and a strong contender for my favorite romantic movie. In this storyline, Daniel (Liam Neeson) is trying to cope with the recent death of his wife and adjust to raising his eleven-year-old stepson, Sam (Thomas Sangster), alone. Sam is becoming isolated and distant, and after a while, Daniel begins to wonder if there's something wrong beyond grief for his mother and asks if there's anything he can do to help.

Sam confesses, feeling guilty that all his angst is not for his mother, that he's in love with a girl at school, Joanna, who he doubts even knows his name. Daniel naturally reacts with some amused relief at the news that Sam's problems are normal, healthy growing pains, but when Sam makes it clear how serious he is, Daniel shifts gears right away to trying to help. Now, this is where a normal fictional parent tells the young character that what he's feeling isn't real, that it doesn't matter, that it'll pass and he'll outgrow it by focusing on more important things. Not Daniel. After Sam vehemently rejects his requisite first suggestions that he's a little young to be in love, or that there are other girls out there for him, Daniel answers simply,

"Fair enough."

Sam begins plotting to get Joanna's attention, and Daniel supports him even when those plots involve practicing the drums at all hours of the day and night.

I'll be the first to note a certain level of irresponsibility in Daniel's parenting. There's a lot to be said for emphasizing to first-timers in love that the world won't end if that first love doesn't work out, and Sam's romantic gesture at the end of the movie, chasing Joanna through post-9/11 airport security at Daniel's encouragement, ends a lot more romantically for all parties involved than it could ever be expected to in real life.

There's something wonderfully refreshing, though, about a fictional parent who doesn't dismiss the love of anyone younger than himself as frivolous. Daniel's a diehard romantic who dares to try to help Sam with love beyond trying to help him not be hurt by it, and Sam welcomes the support. When suggesting the ill-advised airport stunt, Daniel offers the generally far more sage romantic advice that,

"You've got nothing to lose, and you'll always regret it if you don't."

Add to that to the rarity of positive fictional stepparent/stepchild relationships, and these two and their brief plotline is a standout favorite. Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Parent #4 and #5) Here we have another traditional bad parent setup tuned on its head. Edna's daughter and our hero, Tracy Turnblad, wants to be a dancer. She knows it's what she's meant for and can't wait to get home every day and practice to the dance TV show she someday wants to be on. Edna insists that Tracy's destiny is her to take over her laundry business.

*cough*

That bitch! Right? No wonder Tracy's going to run away to follow her dream! Well... no. Not exactly. What happens is way better. We find out that Edna is severely agoraphobic and self-conscious about her weight, and she's afraid of Tracy being hurt the way she has been by people, because Tracy is also heavy. Sure, she's still wrong to try to stop her daughter from chasing her dream even out of the best intentions, but people and characters are wrong sometimes, without being evil. Tracy's dad steps in and encourages Tracy to audition anyway, which she does and, as most of us do the first time out of the gate chasing our dreams, falls flat. Tracy is not easily crushed, however, and continues practicing until she's finally spotted by the host of the show dancing at a school event and gets her break. Know who's more excited for her than anyone else? Edna. All she wants is for Tracy to be happy, and as soon as Tracy proves to her that there's a better way than the hiding technique Edna's used all her own life, she's Tracy's biggest supporter and feels awful for standing in her way. So it's a story about a girl proving she can do better than her shortsighted mother thought she could and finally winning her blessing? Wait, there's still more. Tracy's not angry with her mom or even desperate for her approval. She wants to help her. At the point in the story where she would normally break out of her mother's world and strike out on her own, Tracy drags Edna along for the ride, finally coaxing her out of the house, getting her a makeover, and showing her how the world has begun to change from the one she remembers.

Tracy becomes an icon of change in '60s Baltimore, championing racial integration as well as ahead-of-her-time body type acceptance, and eventually ends up an outlaw when she impulsively hits a police officer with a picket sign at a civil rights rally. She wants one more victory before she's caught, though, and both her parents support her crusade and help her sneak into the TV studio to dance in the final episode of the season which determines the show's new lineup. The play ends on my vote for the most uplifting musical number ever, even accounting for the fact that almost everyone in it was probably arrested immediately afterward, "You Can't Stop the Beat," in which the show is integrated through a well-exploited loophole and both Tracy and Edna take the stage and dance for respect and self-acceptance to wild applause.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

This show is a guilty little pleasure in a lot of ways. It's such a soap with all the seedy underground endeavors of this small town heaped on top of the obvious twisted nature of the Bates family, but it’s got incredibly talented leads and writers who know how to use them and do it fearlessly, and that's all it takes to make it one of my favorites. We all know that basics of Psycho, right? I won't spoil it just in case, but suffice it to say, it would be easy to use that foundation to build a story about the worst mother ever and how she ruins Norman, her unassuming, adorkable son.

Bates Motel doesn't make things that simple. For starters there's the recurring question of whether Norman’s genetic mental problems are severe enough to render his upbringing irrelevant. He's a very sweet, good-hearted person, but he has a predisposition toward instability that would put the best of parents at a loss. Of course, Norma is far from best of parents. She’s clingy, possessive, manipulative and self-absorbed, and oh yes, there are duly uncomfortable incestuous undertones to their relationship that slowly grow and become less undertone-y as the seasons progress and the insanity of both characters blossoms.

She’s probably enough to mean the difference between Norman managing to grow up well-adjusted or not. Yet through all that, she's a pitiable, almost lovable character. She has severe emotional issues of her own, some genetic that have clearly been passed to Norman, some environmental. She’s got her good days and her bad days, and swings believably from someone you want to help to someone you want to run from.

She does honestly love her sons. When she's not in mid nervous breakdown, she wants to do whatever she can to protect them and make them happy. As jealous and critical as she is of most of Norman's girlfriends, many of her her complaints aren't entirely without basis, and she mostly welcomes his great will-they-or-won't-they foil, Emma, doing her best to adjust to wishing them well.

There's a scene in the first season where Norman's older brother, Dylon, tries to get Norman to move in with him, and Norman won't distance himself from their mother on the grounds that "She's going through a lot right now." This is absolutely true. But so is Dylon's counter observation that "She's always going through a lot." Who hasn't known someone this could be said of? Who hasn't been in the agonizing position of being genuinely needed by a not-altogether-horrible person who turns out to be a bottomless pit of perpetual need? Norma is easily the worst parent on this list, but I love her because she's an exceptional instance of a bad parent and a dysfunctional parent/child relationship being complex, well-explored parts of a story rather than background plot contrivances. Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Happy June! With the official Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) blog tour complete, it's time for another fictional favorites list! Hurrah! In honor of Mother's Day, passed in the haze of the tour, and Father's Day, coming up this month, I'm devoting this month to my favorite fictional parents. These parents don't have to be perfect or even that good, but they do have to be full characters, deeper than sources of disapproval and plot obstacles, or of inspiration from beyond the grave, and their kids (or at least one of them) must also be full characters, more than sources of anxiety or McGuffins to be rescued. This list was incredibly difficult to fill, and as a YA fan and author, I'm not the least bit surprised. On behalf of my genre, sorry, parents! First up, Eddard Stark. ****Book/Season 1 Spoiler Alert**** Well, he's not just a source of inspiration from the grave. Like I said, this list was difficult, and it was even more difficult to fit in a couple dads. Of the fictional parents who aren't dead within the first few scenes, there are far fewer dads than moms who aren't downright evil.

And even fewer who aren't utterly incompetent.

I could analyze the causes of this inequality in fiction, and possibly someday I will, but for now, Eddard. At least we get the better part of a book with him alive, in which he and his children follow their own intersecting plotlines, long enough to get to know him well enough to be shocked to lose him so soon. He's noble to a fault and is surprised not everyone else is. He's got no patience for how the titular game of courtly intrigue is played, and it's that lack of skill for unseemly politics and deception that ultimately comes back to bite him. He loves his kids. He wants to teach them right from wrong but also, like any good parent, wants to set them up for good lives, in a world he's increasingly unsuited to survive in himself. He's someone who wants his six- or ten-year-old son (book vs. TV timeline) to watch him perform an execution to learn responsibility,

...yet could be described as lovably naive.

By the way, Cersei, I know what your family killed the last Hand of the King for knowing. Wait, why are you calling for the guards?

He does his best with each of his six children, as well as in his separate endeavors to solve the murder of his friend, but for the best contrast with more typical fictional dads, you have to look at his relationship with Arya.

Arya is the quintessential rebel girl in an oppressive world. She wants adventure. She hates needlework. She can't keep herself clean and pretty for the life of her. She refuses to be a lady. Eddard feels responsible for raising her to be one, so here we've got a conflict that naturally casts her as the hero and him as the villain, but that’s not how it goes. Yes, he wants her to be a lady. Partly because that's just the way things are done, and it's worked fine for him. He's married to a tough if traditional lady he loves. They have a good marriage and a proud house together, and he's not exactly the most imaginative, broad-perspective kind of guy. But there’s more to it than blind traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism. What's a nontraditional girl from a noble family going to do in Westeros? Objectively, her best bet at a livable life is to be what she's expected to be, and Eddard knows that. He tries to talk her into taking that safest bet, painting the role of ladies to her in the best, most respectful light possible, the way he sincerely sees it, but when it's clear she's not biting, he doesn't stop her from following her own much dicier path, going so far as to hire her a secret swordplay teacher.

He's the impetus for many of the plotlines that follow his death, including a few typical revenge bents on the parts of his children, but this is a fictional dad you can get behind avenging, beyond simply being told that he's a beloved dead fictional dad. Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!